MIDLAND — Mackinac Center Legal
Foundation Director Patrick J. Wright filed a motion today before the Michigan
Employment Relations Commission seeking to prevent graduate student research
assistants at the University of Michigan from being unionized as public employees. The motion was filed on
behalf of Melinda Day, a graduate research assistant at U of M's Molecular, Cellular
and Developmental Biology Department.

“This is not an open
question,” said Wright. “MERC has already rejected unionization for these
students. In fact, MERC delivered this ruling years ago in a case involving the
exact same union, the exact same university and the exact same group of graduate
students, and it made its decision after 19 days of hearings, thousands of
pages of exhibits and hundreds of pages of legal briefs. The only difference
now is that a politically divided Board of Regents of the University of
Michigan, over the university administration’s objections, has voted to support
this illegal unionization. The regents cannot unilaterally rewrite the laws of this
state, however.”

MERC’s earlier ruling
came in 1981 in response to a petition by the Graduate Employees Organization —
the same union applying to MERC now — to organize the University of Michigan’s graduate
student research assistants. In that
case, which now serves as legal precedent, MERC denied the GEO’s petition and concluded
that the students were not public employees.

The GEO has not
attempted to show that MERC’s ruling was flawed. If the unionization were
approved, the union would more than double its membership and more than double
its dues to over $1 million annually, according to the Foundation’s estimates.

“Typically, the employer would object here,
but the regents’ 6-2 vote in May favoring union supporters meant that our
client’s legal rights were now at risk,” Wright said.

“The regents are
intruding on the crucial relationship between me and my mentor,” said Day. “Unionization
could interfere with students’ ability to complete their dissertations and obtain
their degrees, because it places a union between students and their faculty
mentors. Our liberty is being lost, and I won’t stand by and let it happen.”